Thursday, 5 November 2015

15 Second Review: American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore (2014)

With American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore, Unearthed Films' founder Stephen Biro has created a faux-snuff film that looks authentically amateur. I don't mean that it looks like footage shot by killers. Rather, it looks like the kind of film schoolkids would make if they were given some prosthetics, a few cameras, and no training. No matter how one feels about the 1980s Guinea Pig series Biro is emulating, Flowers of Flesh and Blood at least boasted some undeniably fantastic effects work. American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore disappoints on that front: no amount of shaking the camera and adding coloured filters in post-production can mask how unconvincing the effects are. The core failure however, is allowing the cast to speak. Films like this do not require Academy Award winning performers, but neither do they require dialogue per se. Indeed, my only recommendation here is that if you really must watch American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore, do so on mute: it is a much more unsettling experience. Anyone lucky enough to buy the three-disc version can indulge in hours of extra material. What exactly that consists of, I will never know: sitting through the 73 minute film - with its pathetic attempts to shock, its annoying insistence on framing everything in extreme close-up, and its atmosphere-sucking extra-diegetic white noise soundtrack - was more than enough torture for me. I hear that the second film in the series (Bloodshock) is currently in post-production. I can only hope that Biro et al put more effort into the sequel than they did this damp squib.